In the Critics this week

Jason Cowley on Cameron, Douglas Hurd on Churchill and Vernon Bogdanor on Powell. PLUS: the NS jazz special

Wynton Marsalis comes back to the Barbican this summer (Photograph: Getty Images

In the leading article in this week’s New Statesman, we ask if David Cameron is capable of ever restoring the Conservative Party to its former status as “one of the most formidable election-winning machines in Europe”. However, the portents for the Tories are not good. “If Mr Cameron is to win a majority he will need to do what no prime minister has done since 1974 and increase his party’s share of the vote. One would not wager on him succeeding where Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher failed. But to do that, he will have to decide if he is a One Nation Tory pragmatist or a consensus-breaking radical. At the moment he is neither.” As Jason Cowley writes in his review of the updated edition of Francis Elliott and James Hanning’s biography of the Prime Minister, Cameron’s views are an incoherent “pick’n’mix of old-style shire Toryism, soft Thatcherism and Notting Hill social liberalism”. The comparison with Thatcher is unflattering: “Cameron has none of the originality of Thatcher, who was not constrained by class and tradition and had a story to tell the electorate of where she’d come from and how she intended to remake the nation through conflict.” We search in vain, Cowley concludes, for evidence of a settled Cameronian world view, for “[he] has published nothing of significance”.

The contrast with the torrential literary output of one of Cameron’s predecessors as Conservative leader is startling. In his review of Mr Churchill’s Profession by Peter Clarke, former Tory Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd examines Winston Churchill’s literary career. In the 1930s, Hurd notes, “Churchill’s personal finances were in a state of crisis. His solution to the problem was simple: he had to step up his literary output.” Clarke’s book, Hurd writes, leaves the reader with “a vivid mental picture of Churchill working night after night in his study at Chartwell, brandy in hand, having played his nightly game of backgammon with [his wife] Clementine and packed her off to bed.”

Also in Books, Vernon Bogdanor considers the legacy of a man who sought but never claimed the Tory leadership, Enoch Powell. Reviewing Enoch at 100, a collection of essays edited by Lord Howard of Rising, Bogdanor writes: “Enoch Powell was, like Thatcher, a teacher of the right … But what did he teach?” Powell’s lesson, Bogdanor argues, was a pernicious one. The notorious 1968 speech in which he foresaw “the River Tiber foaming with much blood” because of immigration “made Powell a hero,” Bogdanor observes, “particularly to the lumpenproletariat, astonished and gratified to discover a person of culture and refinement prepared to echo their fouler thoughts. There are signs in this centenary volume that Powell came to regard the speech as something of a mistake. It was, in truth, unforgiveable.”

Also in the Critics, our jazz special: poet Christopher Reid writes about his late-flowering love affair with jazz; from the archive, we publish a 1960 article by Eric Hobsbawm, who, under the pseudonym "Francis Newton", was the New Statesman's jazz critic from 1955-66. PLUS the New Statesman recommends this summer's unmissable jazz shows and recordings (including Pat Metheny, Wynton Marsalis and Ravi Coltrane).

Elsewhere in the Critics: Ryan Gilbey on Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America; Rachel Cooke on When I Get Older on BBC1; "Dig", a new poem by Julia Copus; Thomas Calvocoressi on Tate Modern's major Edvard Munch retrospective; Antonia Quirke on Radio 4's Meeting Myself Coming Back; and Will Self discovers to his horror that he's going bald.